Catching up on the news with AP:

House panel: Why did Google ‘airbrush history?’

NEW ORLEANS, Louisiana (AP) — Google’s replacement of post-Hurricane Katrina satellite imagery on its map portal with images of the region before the storm does a “great injustice” to the storm’s victims, a congressional subcommittee said.

Whereas in some parts of the world, governments fret that Google is revealing too much of their sovereign lands, in the United States government frets that Google is revealing too little. Am I the only one who thinks this is highly ironic? I feel compelled to add that this is not an April Fool’s post.

While I applaud and agree with the sentiment that newer data is better than older data, certainly after a natural disaster or war, throwing the US House Committee on Science and Technology subcommittee on investigations and oversight (what a mouthful) at this is ridiculous. It should be none of anybody’s business other than Google’s when it comes to prioritizing where it spends its money on updates. Governments are in the wrong when they try to censor imagery, and they are in the wrong when they try to compel a private company to provide a specific service.

I give Google a hard time when it acquiesces to censorship attempts, and I’d give them a hard time if I’d think they were in cahoots with New Orleans to make the place look more attractive for some kind of financial benefit, but I think that this particular conspiracy theory is among the sillier ones I’ve heard of late.

Meanwhile, Google has apparently gone into damage control mode, releasing a statement which you can read below the fold.

One final comment: This should put to rest any doubt, if there still was any, that Google’s geospatial imagery database has become the global default reference. When something is this universally useful, governments tend to want a piece of it.

Continue reading Google’s New Orleans update gets US govt scrutiny →

• SketchUp co-founder Brad Schell has decided to leave Google, reports AECNews. The parting seems to be most amicable.
• Converjed has more about GeoGlobe, the Second Life/KML mashup reported on a few days ago.
• Oxford’s city government has virtually modelled a part of the city with SketchUp, and will release it to the public “once it’s to a completed point where we’re satisfied with it,” reports the Oxford Press.
• TechCrunch’s rumor about Google having acquired street-level image collector Vutool is now two days old, and still there’s no confirmation from any party that it’s true. I wonder what Arrington meant when he wrote: “There are strong indications that Google is the acquiror.” That doesn’t sound like a sure thing, and remember, TechCrunch also got the Google Earth Metaverse rumor wrong. So we’ll just have to wait this out.

Reason prevails in Malaysia. Reports the New Straits Times:

MALAYSIA will not ask Google Earth to blur images of the country’s military facilities to avoid terrorist attacks. Defence Minister Datuk Seri Najib Razak said doing so would indirectly pin-point their location anyway.

“The difference in, or lack of, pixelation of images of the military facilities compared to the surrounding areas will make it easy for visual identification.” In his written reply to Datuk Dr James Dawos Mamit (BN-Mambong), Najib said the images were provided worldwide commercially.

HeyWhaysThat, the panorama generator for Google Maps and Earth I raved about two weeks ago, now does most of the rest of the world as well.

For example, here’s the view from the top of the Matterhorn, and here’s the view from Monte salvatore, near Lugano, from where you can see the Matterhorn, as confirmed by me last year and HeyWhatsThat today.

But there are even more esoteric uses of HeyWhatsThat. It’s forbidden to climb the Pyramids of Giza, but at least you can now create your own virtual panorama. Check it out in Google Earth to get an idea of just how breathtaking the view must be:

Below the fold, an email with more details, tips and information from HeyWhatsThat’s Michael Kosowsky.

Continue reading HeyWhatsThat goes global →

• The extended (i.e. expensive) version of the soon-to-be-launched Adobe PhotoShop CS3 lets you “import, view and interact” with 3D content, including Collada and KMZ files — presumably those containing exported SketchUp content. I’m not sure what this means, but Adobe has some more info (and annoying voice content).
• Earth Addresser by Steffen Kamp and Sven-S. Porst is a very simple freeware application for the Mac that does one thing well: It turns all the addresses of your contacts in your Address Book into a KML file. Screenshot here.
• From the Competition is Good For You department: Virtual Earth also updated its imagery yesterday: There is heaps of new Birds Eye coverage for European cities, including the parental home in Antwerp. (Via RXBBX Blog.)
• The Map Room points to a post on Valleywag which alludes to a rumored list of 15 countries where Google Earth is banned. I have my suspicions: Bahrain tried it, Morocco may have, but no other country’s ever been in the blogs for banning just Google Earth. Of course, some countries heavily restrict access to large tranches of the web, like North Korea and China, so I’m not sure if that counts, though even China seems not to have blocked access to Google Earth, despite some speculation that it had.
• Free GeoTools points to this little piece of beta freeware for the PC: UTMFlyer lets you enter UTM coordinates, then flies you there in Google Earth. it will also convert between “normal” coordinates and UTM. (Via The Map Room)
• Squio blog is blogging Google’s Geodays in the Netherlands, now ongoing (mainly in English).

Google Earth’s imagery data has been updated once again. This post on Google Earth Community has the details: Downtown Vancouver gets the high resolution treatment, as do various shires in the UK and a couple of French cities. Plenty of new high resolution stuff in the US as well.

As for updated imagery, Spain (incl. the Canary Islands) and bits of the US get Google’s love this time round. Details below the fold.

Continue reading Google Earth imagery update: Vancouver, UK, France, Connecticut, etc… →

This is the mother of Google Earth/Second Life mashups: GeoGlobe. Writes Josh Knauer in this blog post:

The GeoGlobe takes feeds (currently KML, GeoRSS and RSS) as input and displays them as properly geolocated prims onto the GeoGlobe [in Second Life]. We undertook this project to experiment with how “real world” data can be visualized effectively within the immersive environment that is SL. Far too often, designers/builders in SL rely on old user interaction paradigms for displaying information. We wanted to push the boundaries a bit for how users can interact with feeds of data available on the web by bringing them into SL in the context of a Google Earth-like experience.

Josh is all too right about people often not using Second Life’s native advantages (such as object scripting) to the fullest. He was at SciFoo last year, where he gave an impressive demo of the Information Commons, a peer-to-peer model for updating GIS information. This here GeoGlobe is just as impressive, and just what I was looking for as a way of visualizing the locations of Swedish embassies around the world in our upcoming virtual embassy in Second Life. Here I am checking it out: